Typing on your laptop and watching the texts of Marcel and Leo appear on the screen

In a New Yorker tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, it was stated that Thompson’s “true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way.”

I tried it this week-end. Aim big, I told myself, staring with total admiration at two favorite classics – one of Tolstoy, the other by Proust. Did I feel flooded with greatness as I set out to do this? No, I felt like their secretary. I felt like I was going to be admonished for using the wrong language by both and that Proust would invariably call out to his mother and tell her to fire me. Tolstoy would be more forgiving, I’m sure. Didn’t I read somewhere that he was scorned and rejected by friends and by women while at the university (his bushy eyebrows and full lips making him feel terribly self-conscious about his looks)? Surely he, the dispirited and disinterested academic that he was, would understand why this typist wasn’t doing justice to his Anna K.

Maybe the problem was that I did not use an inkwell and pen. I’m familiar with those. We actually used them in my first grade class back in Poland (that’s how old I am – or, how behind the times Poland was). Or maybe I should have selected a female author. Maybe I’ll rub nicotine stains on my fingers and stick rocks in my coat pocket and hack away at the Waves when a slow day next comes around. But honestly, I just don't see how I could ever, even momentarily, take ownership of someone else's text. Thompson's imaginative stretch (or audacious presumptuousness?) must have been far greater than mine.